The Devil All the Time

Set in Ohio and West Virginia in the years following World War II, American author Donald Ray Pollock’s novel, The Devil All the Time (2011), tells the stories of various desperate characters, including a veteran suffering from PTSD, a pair of husband-and-wife serial killers, and various corrupt preachers. It is the basis for a 2020 movie of the same name starring Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson.

In a prologue, Pollock introduces the protagonist, Arvin, as a young boy. He sits in a clearing with his father, Willard, on an oak log, joining him in his evening prayer routine. Willard is borderline obsessive when it comes to prayer and expects the same from his son. While Arvin prays, however, his mind wanders and feelings of isolation bubble to the surface. Feels like an outsider at school, he is the victim of relentless bullying. Arvin recalls his father telling him to stand up for himself, but this is easier said than done.

The rest of the book is divided into seven parts. Part One, "Sacrifice," begins in 1945, before the prologue. Willard is a young single man who has just been discharged from combat duty after the end of World War II. As he sits on a bus headed to his home in Coal Creek, West Virginia, he recalls the horrifying things he saw and did during the war. One memory haunts him in particular: that of a soldier he comes across who has been skinned and crucified. Willard shoots the man as an act of mercy, putting an end to his suffering. The bus makes a stop at the Wooden Spoon Diner in Meade, Ohio. There, Willard meets and instantly falls in love with a beautiful waitress, Charlotte Willoughby. At home, he is met by his nervous and emotionally-damaged mother, Emma, and her brother, Uncle Earskell. Willard proceeds to get drunk, and his thoughts turn from the horrors of war to the beautiful waitress he just met. He lets it slip to his mother that he has fallen in love, which upsets her because she made with a bargain with God that if He let her son live, she would arrange a marriage between Willard and poor Helen Hatton.

Willard marries Charlotte anyway, and together they have a son whom they name Arvin. As the years pass, Willard becomes obsessed with prayer. The obsession only deepens when Charlotte contracts cancer. Willard's rituals become progressively more bizarre and upsetting, culminating in animal and even human sacrifice. Willard believes these acts of devotion are necessary to save his wife. Nevertheless, in the end, Charlotte still dies, prompting Willard to commit suicide. Traumatized by his parents' deaths and his father's behavior, Arvin lives with his grandmother, Emma. There, he meets Lenora, an orphan girl whom Emma takes in after her mother, Helen, is killed, most likely by a traveling preacher named Roy who is also Lenora's father. Lenora's murdered mother is the same Helen whom Emma promised to marry to Willard.

In Part 2, "On the Hunt," the reader is introduced to Carl and Sandy Henderson, a pair of murderous lowlifes living in Meade who entertain themselves by picking up male hitchhikers and killing them. Their reign of terror is allowed to persist in part because Sandy's brother, Sheriff Bodecker, is corrupt and incompetent. An unemployed photographer, Carl takes pictures of his victims, calling them models. In one exceedingly depraved image, Carl takes a photograph of Sandy holding the severed head of one of their victims in her arms as if it were a baby. It is Carl's favorite photo.

In Part 3, "Orphans and Ghosts," Arvin and Lenora grow up and become very close. When Lenora is bullied at school, Arvin comes to her defense, fighting the bullies. The book also repeatedly drops in on Carl and Sandy. Part 4, "Winter," focuses largely on their exploits.

In Part 5, "Preacher," we learn more about Roy, the traveling preacher who killed Lenora's mother. Roy lives with his physically disabled cousin, Theodore. After moving on from the Coal Creek Church of the Holy Ghost Sanctified, Roy is replaced by a new preacher, Pastor Teagardin, who lives with his much younger wife, Cynthia. Lenora believes Teagardin to be an exceptionally holy man, but Arvin has his doubts. These suspicions are validated when the reader learns of Teagardin's seduction and sexual corruption of Cynthia. Teagardin then successfully seduces Lenora, getting the young girl pregnant. Furious, Arvin shoots Teagardin dead and flees Coal Creek.

After Part 6, "Serpents," which follows more of Carl's and Sandy's depraved, murderous rampage, the storylines of the major characters converge in the final section, titled "Ohio." In the wake of Theodore's death, a repentant Roy returns to Appalachia to track down and apologize to Lenora, who has since died. Unfortunately, he encounters Carl and Sandy who make Roy their latest victim. Later, Carl and Sandy happen to pick up Arvin, but after they attack him, Arvin gets the upper hand and shoots both of them dead. Sandy's brother, Sheriff Bodecker, pursues Arvin, and they end up in a standoff in the same clearing where Willard performed sacrifices. Arvin kills Bodecker and walks down the highway, full of hope for the first time in a long while.

According to The New York Times, The Devil All the Time is as "sickly beautiful as it is hard-boiled. [Pollock's] scenes have a rare and unsettling ability to make the reader woozy, the ends of the chapters flicking like black horseflies off the page."